Love food more, waste it less.
As you all know, I've been blogging about food waste for half a decade now, and during that time, I've always felt a bit jealous of places like the U.K., where food waste gets a whole lot more attention than it does here in the U.S. (There's a whole non-profit over there, Love Food, Hate Waste, dedicated to fighting food waste).
But here in the U.S., food waste just doesn't come up all that often.
We like to talk about food, photograph food, eat food, read about food, and, thanks to the Food Network, we even like to watch other people prepare and eat food. But when it comes to thinking and reading about what happens to the food we don't eat...well, that's a whole lot less popular.
Hopefully that's all about to change, though, and I'm part of a team that's working to give the food waste issue the attention it deserves. Click here to finish reading all about it!
I hadn't thought about how we glorify "new" food via the Food Network and magazines before -- I love the idea of promoting ways to use food to reduce waste. I would much prefer a cooking show about foraged fruits, veggies and plants than one about special cheeses 🙂
You know, it would be pretty awesome to see a show about using leftovers too. Or using random odds and ends.
They should model it off one of those "contractor/host goes home with random family from the hardware store" or "extreme home makeover" programs. So "chef/host goes home with random family from the grocery store" and does a snap menu plan using pantry items and whatever else is in stock, totally changing the way they think about their food supplies. It would be awesome!
Liz, an incident like that is what motivated me to learn to cook - we were low on food, then couldn't get any more for a couple of days; someone made the last dinner from the odds and ends.
Furthermore, what you describe is *exactly* my definition of how to cook. I can do all sorts of fancy things, and cook lots of meals without a cookbook, cook competently (or even excellently) in multiple cuisines. But my definition of being able to cook is still: walk into a strange home and be able to pull together a meal from what I find.
I think Alton Brown would be a natural for this. Or Martin Yan.
I would love to see a show about using up leftovers as a meal plan. For example, when we go camping I pack a rather large amount of ground beef. One day 1 we'll have hamburgers, and I'll cook up what we need. Day 3 it's tacos, where I cook all of the remaining meat, and any hamburgers that didn't get eaten on day 1 (alternately, leftover burgers might get turned into sloppy joes for lunch). On day 5 it's chili made with the leftover taco meat. At home we don't eat hamburgers much, but it goes the same way, and any leftover chili gets frozen for easy meals later.
I just found this article on NPR about startup companies trying to combat food waste: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/10/26/240990793/start-ups-try-to-reroute-food-waste-to-the-hungry . Some of the comments were interesting - apparently there is some resistance to donating food, for liability reasons.
Hi from the UK! We are lucky here - wasting is really frowned upon, and we have several TV chefs who have done shows dedicated to showing people how to stretch their food budgets and reduce waste. In my county we are lucky enough to be provided with free compost bins so we can make even the wasted stuff work for us. It's not perfect though; we still waste around 7 million tonnes of food a year and we have the same issues here with most people not buying carefully or eating healthily enough.
I work for a charity where some of our customers don't have enough money to buy food, so this makes me more conscious of what I'm using, and very ashamed if I waste something that another would cherish. I get a little bit cross when I see things like Man v Food, which just seems to encourage greediness and wastage.
I love Food Waste Friday - it makes me take a long hard look at myself!
Gave this post a shout on on the Food Waste Friday post today.
Here's to a successful US campaign in reducing food-waste!